hand you his card. His voice unsteady,
he'll tell you to call him at home you,

an only child on her way
to see the ocean for the first time. You, who have managed

to live a moral life, whose troubled heart has never
surrendered, now with your wild and dangerous

lies, you could turn toward this stranger
and open.

Wound

When you asked if I wanted to see
and I said yes, you opened your robe,
lifted off the gauze, and exposed
a barbed wire fence cut
through a field of snow.
The snow wasn't white exactly
but used or forgotten, the air
hardened by winter so that
to breathe was to choke.
And along its black length
that separated into two
your past and your future,
that fence was streaked
with indecipherable detritus
as though some small animal
had been dragged from its life into it
and died there, its clots of fur
still frozen in the barb.
This is your chest, I told myself,
not some deserted pasture
flattened by winter over
what is lost or missing.
I should have closed my eyes
or pictured the ocean instead.
Twenty-seven years after your death
I still can't turn away. I shut my eyes
and see your chest stitched closed.
If only poems were the only places
to know such cold.